There is very strong evidence to indicate that climate change has occurred on a wide range of different timescales from decades to many millions of years; human activity is a relatively recent addition to the list of potential causes of climate change. It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future, but careful estimates of potential changes and associated uncertainties have been made. Scientists continue to work to narrow these areas of uncertainty. Uncertainty can work both ways, since the changes and their impacts may be either smaller or larger than those projected.

This is a dramatic reversal from the Royal Society’s previous reports from a few years ago, when the group urged the U.K. government to take urgent action to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and to do so “as fast as possible.”

The U.S. took that message to heart. The current Administration is attempting to tip the balance in favor of renewable energy by advocating a cap-and-trade system and renewable electricity mandates and has allocated additional billions of dollars in government spending for government-picked clean energy sources. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving down a long regulatory path to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act because CO2 and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten public health and the environment.

With such inconclusive and uncertain scientific evidence, Congress should cease from implementing any new policies to avoid GHGs and prohibit the EPA from doing the same. We should welcome an objective scientific debate on global warming, but when you mix politics into the equation, having an uninfluenced, transparent debate is wishful thinking.

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American government, Obama, holding people, the economy and the free markets back over an uncertainty! The clowns in Washington are wasting time and other peoples money. Didn't obama say he is working day and night on employment issues? We should get daily updates. Despicable for America to have to submit to a dictator or someone so pompous that "rules" the take-over of the principles, liberties, freedoms and rights of the American people, unwilling to govern govern according to his job description. Let the free markets innovate…

government should get rid of ALL policies reflecting this great uncertainty!

Your last paragraph alone embodies the duplicity of this post. You cannot honestly "welcome an objective scientific debate" and lament the allegedly inconclusive state of climate science in the same breath. There are definitely uncertainties regarding climate change, but that anthropogenic (human-caused) GHG emissions are a major contributing influence is not one of them. That "debate" is entirely political.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is very scientifically conservative. Lest I confuse any ideological readers, that means "reserved" in this context; they are careful about what they write to a fault and professionally oppose any type of exaggeration not supported by data. They released a set of reports in May of this year including the following passage:

"A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….

Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities."

To backtrack on climate science (which would be very difficult for America to do considering we have not acted at all) is to replace actual science with political science. It is literally that black and white.

It appears that this administration is out to destroy our economy and have our nation become a state of the New World. Pres. Obama seems as if he will have his way either by world treaty, or by one of his many Carzs such as the EPA make law going around Congress. I hope Americans will vote to save Our County in November. The teachings contradict each other in Global Warming, it's more sensible to error than to do something that will ruin our children's future. It needs to be looked at outside the oversight of Politics. I would ask our congress to recover some common sense and govern from that.

People who cite extremist ideologues like Bill McKibben have no credibility in these precenicts, or wherever rational thought prevails.

The global warming crisis is a fraud. Its adherents, while giving lip service to science, are actually practicing a form of religion. Challenge the accepted dogma and you are excommunicated from the fold and relegated to the ranks of the “deniers.” There are at least three primary contributing factors for this phenomenon: (1) the massive influence of federal grant money ($40 billion or more) for global warming research; (2) the influence of politics and environmentalism on science; and (3) “presentism”–the inordinate preoccupation with the here and now rather than a healthy long-term perspective based on geologic time scales appropriate to climate science.

In the field of climate science, presentism is a killer because it focuses a short-term perspective on a subject that can only be analyzed and evaluated from a long-term perspective. Conclusions drawn primarily on the basis of current phenomena (in this case the warming of 1978-1998) are fraught with uncertainty; and policy prescriptions based on those conclusions are foolhardy at best.

The reason we have gotten this far with such nonsense is that the 1978-1998 warming interval coincided with the birth of the modern environmental movement and the political aspirations of Al Gore. Combine this presentist mindset with our desire for instant gratification or results and you have the ingredients for economic masochism on a massive scale.

At the time cap and trade passed the House of Representatives (June 2009), Democratic members of Congress were, in unison, telling their constituents that it would cost the equivalent of a postage stamp per person per day ($160.00 per year). The Heritage Foundation estimated the annual per family cost at about $3,000 initially, and rising to over $4,000 by 2032. But then, low and behold, Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed an FOIA request for the previously suppressed Treasury Dept. study on the costs of cap and trade (tax). That study pegged the annual cost at $1,742.00. Certainly not something that the Democrats in Congress wanted the general public to know.

Gore has predicted sea level rise of 20 feet by the end of this century. In 2007, on Larry King Live, he threw out the possibility of a one-meter increase by as soon as 2017, causing “ten of millions of climate refugees.” He also said “if Greenland were to break up or slip into the sea or West Antarctica, or half of either or half of both, it would be a 20-foot increase, and that would lead to more than 450 million climate refugees.” Such a scenario is irresponsible fantasy. The IPCC estimate of sea level rise by 2017 is 0.8 to 1.7 inches. New satellite measurements, published in Science magazine in 2006, have determined that Greenland is currently losing ice at the rate of 25 cubic miles per year. Since Greenland has a total of 685,000 cubic miles of ice, that’s a loss rate of 0.4 percent per century. Either Gore had to know that, or he is a complete buffoon, and should go back to Tennessee and hunker down, without Tipper.

Gore's intention was to dramatize sea level rise sufficiently to generate an emotional response by the easily influenced, and by schoolchildren. It’s called brainwashing. His graphics all suggested massive inundation of coastal areas around the world, including Florida and NYC. It's no wonder he won't debate anyone. He'd get his clock cleaned.

And nine of the most glaring were cited by the High Court in London in a case which challenged the screening of his “Inconvenient Truth” to British schoolchildren. Christopher Monckton has challenged Gore to debate the issue, but the fraud has declined. Incidentally, they are both non-scientists, so it’s not like Gore has to go up against the likes of Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Nir Shaviv, Edward Wegman, Christopher Landsea, or Eigel Fris-Christensen, or even Patrick Michaels. Monckton, in addition to being a non-scientist, however, has a far more sophisticated grasp of the science, which is, no doubt, why Gore is afraid to debate him.

Incidentally, Monckton was scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last June on the same day as Gore, but Henry Waxman and Democrats, at Gore’s request, refused to let him do so. Since Republicans on the committee have a right to call their own witnesses, this was a breach of Congressional protocol. However, juxtaposing these witnesses would have made Gore look like the fool that he is.

Bjorn Lomborg also challenged Gore to debate, at a WSJ Economics Conference (speaking of the WSJ) in 2009. Lomborg said:

“I don’t mean to corner you, or maybe I do mean to corner you, but would you be willing to have a debate with me on that point?” asked the polo-shirt wearing Dane.

“I want to be polite to you,” Mr. Gore responded. But, no. “The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue,” he said. “It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake,” he added. As an example, he pointed to a new addition to the budget for the island nation of the Maldives: “Funds to buy a new nation.”

This is the response of man afraid of having to defend his position publically, which is why he says “the science is settled.” This is the statement of a blind ideologue, not someone open to scientific inquiry. He’s simply memorized a bunch of talking points which can recite to sympathetic interviewers. If anyone strays from the script, however, Gore is on extremely thin ice. But, while he’s a buffoon, he’s no fool and knows enough not to subject himself to open-ended queries.

CO2, methane, and other trace gases are relatively minor factors in the complex series of factors that affect temperature: solar activity being the most significant, but also cosmic rays (which affect cloud cover), the earth’s axial tilt, its elliptical orbit, the capacity of the ocean’s as a heat sink, and the self-regulating mechanism that constitutes the earth’s thermostat. Many of these factors, and their interaction, are still inadequately understood. Taken together, they present genuine challenges to climatologists.

But there's a reason why the radical environmentalists cite CO2, etc. as the villains. Because, unlike the sun and the other mega forces that they cannot control, citing anthropogenic causes provides a basis for a massive government control over our lives.

The global warming crisis is the biggest scientific fraud of all time and many on the left, being preternaturally gullible to begin with, have been sucked in by the hype. After November 2, these folks can be returned to their playpens where they cannot do harm to themselves or the rest of society.

Remember, a crisis is something too important to waste. If there wasn't a crisis and someone to blame for it what would the Obama administration do for a living? What excuse would they have for riding to the rescue and raising taxes to cover the cost?

Look what the "threat" of global warming has done for Al Gore; he's a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire, now. How many other of our friends in Congress are invested in "green" energy alternatives, like the Illinois Carbon Exchange?

The Nazi salute was the salute of the extreme enviromentalist from 1880to 1925.It was turned into a semi religious cult called the volk. In 1939 the head of the Nazi health system(killing the unwanted) stated the next killing system like Hitler's would be in the United States. In his own words ,on film at the Reichstag. Seventy years in advance, predicting passage of the Obama Health care law. Hitler wasn"t German either, he was Austrian. So, by law he couldn't hold the office of Chancellor. Hitler's health care system wasn't German it was American, by the same organizations that wrote the current health care bill. Using the enviroment as a cover to destroy a country, that was Hiltler's alone, and Al Gore's. You can't hide the engineering, like catchers mit,it has one purpose. Nancy said it best, Pass the bill, and then find out what's in it. Get on the train and find out what they have planned for you when you get off. Fools.

Who cares if global warming is true? You know what they say – if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen! Much of the world is too cold anyway. Perhaps this is just God's way of opening up areas of the Arctic and Antarctic to become arable land. There used to be plants growing there (how else do you get oil?) So maybe we are on the road to a time when we can repopulate these areas that are too cold now. People always think they know better than God what is going to happen or if things will be better or worse, but they don't. Besides, if the oceans come and take New York and San Francisco off the map is that really a bad thing. Maybe my house will be beachfront property and I can make a killing. I certainly can't sell it now in the middle of this economic freeze the liberals have created!

Utter BS. Thanks for cutting out 10 pages of the 'paragraph' you posted, you have completely misrepresented the Royal Society. Thanks also for not deleting this comment, should you chose to leave something remotely accurate on your blog.

[…] Great Britain’s most prominent scientific body significantly softened its position on global warming after 43 of its members complained that the previous position did not take into account dissenting evidence. Although the Royal Society’s climate change guide still asserts that greenhouse gas gases resulting from human activity contributes to warming, it does so more prudently: Read More Here […]

With the recent implosion of the UN IPCC, the Royal Society has taken the place of the IPCC as the world's authority on climate change (or lack thereof). The question is, now that the world knows that climate change is a non-issue, what is the EU going to do with their corrupt carbon trading market?

"Countering" supported facts with unsupported opinion. Clever and persuasive. But I guess that's about par for the course with this crowd, isn't it klem? Or maybe that was an attempt at mocking humor? But if you'd actually read Grassrootbeer's second link, you would see that he has a very real point: What was presented here as one paragraph was actually separated byt 10 pages and 48 paragraphs. Does that sound honest to you?

By Nicolas Loris Great Britain’s most prominent scientific body significantly softened its position on global warming after 43 of its members complained that the previous position did not take into account dissenting evidence. Although the Royal Societ…

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